The Rev. Pat Watkins, retired, served as the General Board of Global Ministries as a “Missionary for the Care of God’s Creation.”
Pat’s work has its roots in the Virginia Annual Conference. It builds on a theology that recognizes that care for creation is a fundamental aspect of Christian mission.
Pat is a clergy member of the Virginia Conference. He and his wife, the Rev. Denise Honeycutt, were missionaries in Nigeria from 1995 to 1998 and he was a Church and Community Worker missionary in Virginia from 2009 through 2013. He was earlier affiliated with interfaith organizations in Virginia.
A lifelong United Methodist, Pat says that the church has been the catalyst through which his faith journey and call to mission service have taken place. He was strongly influenced as a young person by participation in the United Methodist Youth Fellowship and a church-related Boy Scouts program. While serving as a missionary in Nigeria, he became deeply interested in the relation between faith and God’s creation. While faith has traditionally looked at relationship with God and relationships with other people, he began to see a relationship between faith and the created order. He says: “I am convinced that my faith can and must embrace a ministry that calls for the care and healing of God’s creation.”